"This is a serious business," said a straight-faced Adrian Erickson, an investigator who spent five years tracking Bigfoot across the land and collecting evidence. "We don't have a mountain of evidence, we have a mountain range of evidence."

Billed as offering never-before-seen "Hi-def Bigfoot video," the event drew a few local TV stations from Dallas as well as the Houston Chronicle's science reporter, who has spent the last year probing the Bigfoot issue.

The video, alas, proved a disappointment.

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Erickson spent a large sum, perhaps as much as $1 million, between 2005 and 2010 to prove the existence of the mythical Bigfoot, a large, hairy apelike creature that according to one poll last year is believed to be real by as many as 30 percent of Americans. It is the stuff of legend and for decades has sparked passions.

This venture tracked Bigfoot in a number of states, including Texas, as well as in Canada. One of the highlights, Erickson said, was the tracking in Kentucky of a what he claimed was a small Bigfoot family.

Matt Schaub?

The videos shown at the news conference ranged from grainy night shots that showed almost no detail to one daytime video in which a hairy animal of indeterminate species is resting in a fetal position on a forest floor. (One reader, reacting to this image on Twitter, inquired whether it might be Matt Schaub).

The final, most heavily touted bit of video showed a shadowed, somewhat apelike face that appeared to have a mouth of teeth. But clear, or in high-definition, it was not. It could have been a gorilla at the zoo. Or a trick of lighting.

Dennis Pfohl, the project's manager, described the video as the best that could be obtained in difficult conditions.

Erickson offered a more colorful explanation for how for so long bipedal creatures measuring up to 8 feet tall could elude ubiquitous cameras in the world's third most populous country.

Bigfoot, he surmised, had survival skills, nighttime vision and intelligence far beyond the capacity of humans. They know how to cover their tracks and they have a sixth sense humans don't possess. If he were covered in hair, Erickson explained, didn't require food to be cooked by fire and knew if he showed himself he'd get shot, "Well, nobody would ever see me."

The group of Bigfoot researchers said they were presenting their case to the media because scientists had not accepted their findings. It's unfathomable, Erickson said. After all, even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had acknowledged to him - off the record - Bigfoot's existence.

"This has been the most frustrating experience of my life," Erickson said. "The greatest detriment to its recognition are the scientists themselves. It's very easy for them to criticize the efforts of lay people. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on the over-study of marine life or grizzly bears, but not one penny on the study of Sasquatch."

Erickson said he realized that scientists would only accept Bigfoot with DNA evidence. So he, and others, collected DNA samples and sent them to Melba Ketchum, a geneticist in Nacogdoches. She had the samples tested.

"We did the same thing the Human Genome Project did, except we did it on three samples instead of one," Ketchum said.

No support for claim

The results of Ketchum's study, which she said Erickson bankrolled at a cost of $500,000, were published earlier this year in a scientific journal, DeNovo, that did not exist until a week before the study's publication. Since then, it has not published any other articles.

At the time, the Chronicle had several world-class geneticists review the paper.

"To state the obvious, no data or analyses are presented that in any way support the claim that their samples come from a new primate or human-primate hybrid," Leonid Kruglyak, a UCLA geneticist, told the Chronicle at the time.

Nevertheless, a Houston-based scientist who participated in the Human Genome Project agreed to analyze the DNA, and the Chronicle arranged for this scientist to obtain the data from Ketchum.

No yeti so far

It was in everyone's interest for the DNA to confirm a new kind of apelike species. If the evidence backed up Ketchum's claims, the Chronicle had a blockbuster story. The local geneticist would have had a hand in making the scientific discovery of the decade, or perhaps the century. And Ketchum would be vindicated.

The DNA, the Houston geneticist said, proved to be a mix of known species. There was no yeti, at least not yet.

(Why give the scientist anonymity? Because some of his peers would question his engagement on such a topic, believing it unworthy of valuable research time. But make no mistake, he is a top-notch scientist at the top of his field.)

On Tuesday, Ketchum sought to refute the expert analysis.

Mainstream scientists, she said, have a problem with interpreting the Bigfoot DNA because it's not consistent with evolution.

"Because it's novel, it's new and there's nothing to compare it to," she explained. "It doesn't fit well within the tree of life.